A new experimental website, dubbed “Many Eyes,” lets users upload data they want to visualize, and try sophisticated tools to generate interactive displays.  As people share videos and photos with sites like YouTube and Flikr, now they can share more technical types of displays: graphs, charts and other visuals they create to help them analyze data buried in spreadsheets, tables or text.

The site was created by scientists at the Watson Research Center of I.B.M. in Cambridge, Mass., to help people publish and discuss graphics in a group, according to the New York Times.  People can register at the site, and then comment on one another’s work, perhaps visualizing the same information with different tools and discovering unexpected patterns in the data.

Collaboration tools like this can be an effective way to spur insight and discussion, said Pat Hanrahan, a professor of computer science at Stanford whose research includes scientific visualization. “When analyzing information, no single person knows it all,” he said. “When you have a group look at data, you protect against bias. You get more perspectives, and this can lead to more reliable decisions.”  In the scientific and research communities, this is more important than ever. 

Currently, the site offers 16 ways to visualize and present data.  From stack graphs and bar charts to diagrams that let people map relationships, as well as tree-maps that can help show information in colorful rectangles.  The latter of which has been the most popular by far.  So far, the most popular visualizations have included things like maps of relationships in the New Testament as well as displays of the comparative frequency of words used in speeches by Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

Users can embed images and links to their visualizations in their Web sites or blogs, just as they can embed YouTube videos. “It’s great that people can paste in a YouTube video of cats” on their blogs, Dr. Viégas said. “So why not a visual that gives you some insight into the sea of data that surrounds us? I might find one thing; someone else, something completely different, and that’s where the conversation starts.”  This is where the service shines in my book- there’s so much information constantly floating around the internet, it would be nice to have an easy to use graphical solution to help visualize all that data.

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Entry was posted on Sunday, August 31st, 2008 at 7:52 pm under Internet.

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